


Nights On Earth

by PockySquirrel



Category: Power Rangers Megaforce
Genre: Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-01-04
Updated: 2015-01-04
Packaged: 2018-03-05 09:47:57
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,509
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/3115547
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/PockySquirrel/pseuds/PockySquirrel
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Night falls and Orion is left alone with his thoughts. A look into his experiences as he arrives on Earth, meets Ernie and the other Rangers, and searches for a place to belong.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Nights On Earth

**Author's Note:**

  * For [Mara](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Mara/gifts).



> Written in response to the prompt: "I want Orion fic. More specifically, I want an explanation for happy dancing Orion. How does he get to be happy smiling guy after seeing his planet destroyed? How in the world has the team not noticed he's sleeping at the school? In other words, please fix the show for me :)"
> 
> Many thanks to Mara for prompting something that I frankly would have written anyway, and thanks to Angel Negra for the beta.

He spends the night on the Armada ship.

It's different from every other night he's spent on the ship since he left Andresia. The subtle hum and vibration of powerful engines that usually lulls him to sleep is silent, and the deathly silence of space outside has been replaced by the gentle but persistent din of this living, vibrant, foreign world. The rustles and chirps of native flora and fauna, the faint roar of four-wheeled vehicles being piloted down roads some distance from where he's crashed. 

Peaceful sounds, but all he can hear is danger.

This world faces a peril that plagues his mind, and the looming threat of the Armada is never far from his thoughts. He knows all too well what sort of havoc their might could wreak on a place like this, and it is that knowledge that drove him here in the first place. He never knew much of life beyond Andresia, had no idea what to expect when he finally reached Earth. But the first brief glimpses he's caught of Earth's people remind him so much of his own that it makes his chest burn with anger and fear, for the danger Earth faces as well as for his own planet.

Laying on his back, the night sky is visible through the canopy of the ship's cockpit. Earth's moon is large and bright and alien, and every moving point of light he sees provokes worries of Armada fighters before he realizes they're nothing more than local aircraft and satellites. His morpher is close at hand, just in case. 

Now that he's finally here, it's become that much more difficult to keep still and wait. All he's done since the Armada destroyed his home has led him to this moment. All his actions have been fueled by singular desire - to stalk the Armada, to take his revenge on them, to devastate them as thoroughly as they devastated Andresia. To kill the beast before it devours yet another helpless world. But now that he's here, he's realized he has no plan. No idea of how to attain this goal.

He needs rest and he knows it. Time to recover from the long journey and gather the strength he needs to fight. But he lies on the floor of the crashed starfighter and finds that sleep escapes him.

***

The mall seems as good a place as any to start. 

The word 'mall' is unfamiliar to Orion, but the building itself is recognizable as a hub for both commerce and social activity. It had also been heavily damaged in the first Armada attack. He's surprised and impressed at how good it already looks, the community having banded together to make repairs, although the surviving walls still bear a smattering of too-familiar scorch marks. 

Orion walks into the shop and sits down, only intending to stay for a few minutes, spend some time observing the Earth natives here before moving on, when Ernie approaches him, handing him a paper cup filled with...something. He looks from the man to the cup and back again. 

"I'm sorry, but I didn't order this."

"I know, but you looked like you could use it," is the reply.

"I can't pay for it," Orion adds.

Ernie looks as though he expected as much. "That's fine. It's on the house."

Orion examines the cup, scoops up a small amount with the little plastic spoon, and takes a tentative bite. The soft substance is freezing cold and almost overpoweringly sweet. He looks up at Ernie, wide-eyed.

"What is this?"

Ernie frowns at him, puzzled. "It's frozen yogurt. You...aren't from around here, are you?"

"No," Orion admits. "No, I'm not."

He ends up staying in the shop for the rest of the day. He and Ernie talk for awhile, after he finishes his complimentary yogurt, and as the shop gets busier and Orion more bored, he decides to get up and start helping Ernie out. Clearing off tables, bringing trays back to the counter. Trying to repay him for that small bit of charity. 

After a couple hours of this, Ernie hands him a brightly-colored apron.

“If you’re going to help out, you should at least look the part,” he explains. 

They spend the rest of the afternoon learning about one another. Orion learns how the froyo machine works, how to execute the perfect swirl. He learns how to work the cash register, and picks up how the Earthlings’ system of currency works along the way. Ernie knows that he’s new in town - it’s not a lie, technically, just a minor omission - and that his home was destroyed in the Armada attack. Which isn’t a lie either. His home is just further away than Ernie could ever imagine. 

He recognizes the Rangers when they come in. It isn’t any kind of instantaneous knowledge of who or what they are, just a strange, warm, familiarity; an echo of the electric thrill he feels when he morphs. They exchange warm greetings with Ernie when they come in, so he asks about them.

“Some of my best customers,” Ernie said. “Very nice kids. Strange, though. Half the time they run out the door before they even get to finish their froyo.”

He makes a point of being the one to serve their table, and by the time he’s finished distributing their order, he’s sure of it. 

Other Rangers. He feels a sense of kinship with them, a yearning to belong. After being alone for such a long time, that’s a strange feeling. Even a frightening one.

He doesn’t reveal himself to them just yet. This is neither the time or the place. But he fixes each of their faces in his memory, confident that they will meet again.

After the shop closes for the day, Ernie doesn’t want him to leave. He doesn’t know about the spaceship, of course, and therefore assumes that Orion has no place to go. He offers up the back room as an alternative, a safe place to sleep until he gets back on his feet. The idea makes Orion uncomfortable, but he finds himself unable to say no. And at least the couch proves to be more comfortable than the deck floor of an Armada fighter, even if it is slightly too short to accommodate his height, forcing him to draw his knees toward his chest.

He listens to the hum of the froyo machine through the wall, and thinks about the other Rangers as he drifts off to sleep.

***

He spends the night in the school. 

The idea occurs to him when Noah takes him there after class ends for the day. They spend a few hours in the computer lab, going over the Ranger database and fabricating Orion’s new Earth-native identity. Ernie has offered him a real job and he’s excited to accept; it’s just a matter of having all the necessary documentation in order. Being a Ranger makes this fairly easy to accomplish. A few messages sent to the past Rangers the Megaforce team has encountered in the recent weeks, and they quickly realize they aren’t the first to have had this problem. Rangers have been duping the system into allowing their alien friends to live on Earth unnoticed for nearly two decades, and they have it down to a science. Between that and the newly developed Office of Interstellar Relations having recently proposed the construction of an SPD station in Newtech City, it seems that at least this part of Orion’s path has been well cleared for him. 

Thus far, none of the other Rangers have asked him where he’s been living. They apparently either assume he’s still staying in the spaceship, or that if he has it together enough to find a job, he has it together enough to find lodging. So when they’re finished renewing the database and Noah decides to call it a night, Orion makes some excuse to delay following him out of the school and stays behind. 

He first ducks into the locker in a moment of panic, when he hears the janitor coming down the hall and needs to avoid being seen. It’s only once he’s in there that he decides concealment isn't the only advantage here. The small space encloses him like an armor and he feels safe, protected. He's not sure why; maybe just because it's so different from the silent desolation of Andresia after the attack, the vast emptiness of space he traversed to get here.

It's physically awkward, but he decides to stay inside the locker regardless. It's the best night's sleep he's gotten in weeks.

***

He decides that he likes Earth music. 

It's so much noisier than what he's used to, and it's a little jarring after so much time spent alone in the silence of space, but exhilarating, too. Noise is helpful, he finds. The school gets stiflingly quiet at night, and he can't stand it. The silence bears down on him, suffocating, and he retreats into the locker with his heart pounding and his memories racing through his head, fighting to pull air into his lungs. So he tinkers with the PA system until the local pop station plays through the speakers and music fills the building. 

His days have started to fall into a new but comfortable routine. He works at Ernie's. He spends his off hours with the Rangers, who welcome him with open arms, eager to teach him about their planet and learn about his. The Armada attacks and he fights, beating them back with his team at his side. A thrill of satisfaction courses through him with every X-Borg that falls. When night falls, he sneaks into the school, listens to music until it's time to sleep.

It’s been a particularly good day. A good shift at Ernie’s. A heady victory over the Armada’s latest monster. Adrenaline and elation surge through him, and when a song he knows and enjoys starts playing over the PA system, he loses himself in it. 

He dances through the school in his nightclothes, in reckless and joyful abandon. He loses himself completely in the moment, forgetting everything - Andresia’s fate, the ongoing war against the Armada, the danger Earth still faces. He’s alive and here and able to fight for a planet that needs him. He has a team, friends, and together with them, they’re doing the impossible. They’re winning. 

He’s free, body and spirit alike unfettered and light. 

He tucks himself into his locker once he’s finally worn himself out, satisfied and exhausted, and that’s when it hits him. These feelings he has, that feel so fresh and new. These are parts of his heart that have gone unused for so long that they’ve fallen into disrepair, and it’s a shock to his system to have had them stutter and roar back to life so suddenly. When was the last time he danced like that? When was the last time he felt able to laugh and smile? 

Not since before the attack.

Not since Andresia fell.

A wave of guilt crashes over him, because what right does he have to feel so happy? What right does he have to rejoice in his own life, when so many others have died? How can he justify celebrating when the Armada is still out there, and his vengeance is far from complete?

His teammates are his friends, but they’re no replacement for the family and friends the Armada took from him. He’s sickened with himself that the thought would even cross his mind. The enormity of what he’s lost is never far from his mind, but now, standing in stark contrast to what he’s found here on Earth, the force of it hits him head-on.

He rests his forehead against the locker’s door and weeps silently. 

***

Orion opens the door of the locker and finds all five of the other Rangers standing outside of it, wearing expressions of disapproval. His mouth hangs open, eyes darting from one face to the next, before his face twitches into a nervous smile.

“Hey,” Orion greets them, the word sounding lame even to his own ears. “You guys are here early.”

“How long has this been going on?” Gia demands.

“How long has what been going on?”

“This,” she waves a hand at the locker. “You sleeping in the school.”

“I started right after I met you guys,” he admits, sheepish.

The result of that admission is pandemonium. Gia and Emma are scolding him, Jake is trying not to laugh, Noah is alternately yelling at Jake that it’s not funny and blaming himself for not noticing sooner. Troy finally gets everyone settled down. 

“No more of this, Orion,” he says, and his tone makes it apparent that he’s Red Ranger for a reason. “You need a proper place to stay.”

“What’s not proper about this?” Orion asks.

“Well, for one, you could get in real trouble if someone catches you,” Emma reasons.

“And I’m pretty sure sleeping in lockers isn’t healthy,” Jake adds, still snickering. Noah elbows him in the ribs again.

Orion shoves his hands into his pockets, eyes dropping to the freshly waxed floor. 

“Where else am I supposed to go?” he asks. “My ship is in bad shape, and even if it wasn’t, it’s an X-Borg starfighter. It wasn’t designed to be lived in.”

“Don’t worry about that,” Troy replies. “We’ll figure something out.”

He’s antsy for the rest of the day, wondering what ‘we’ll figure something out’ is going to mean for him. And although he feels badly about it, knowing the other Rangers only have his best interests at heart, he’s a little bit annoyed. Sure, the school wasn’t anything resembling a real home, but he was getting used to it there. And now his teammates seem determined to mess with his routine. 

There’s no attack that day. It’s a shame, because Orion sorely needs some sort of an outlet for all this pent-up anxious energy. Ernie’s is busy at intervals, and filling the orders and cleaning up the shop helps some, but he finds himself pacing the kitchen when there’s downtime, and his boss and friend urges him repeatedly to calm down. 

The Rangers finally show up at the shop that evening and Orion all but bolts out of the kitchen to greet them.

“Ernie, I’m going to take my break, okay?” he calls over his shoulder.

“Please, do!” Ernie replies, shaking his head.

He pulls up a chair at the Rangers' table, sitting near the front edge of the seat as he asks, “Well?”

“You're going to stay with me,” Troy says. “I talked it over with the others, and I asked about it at home, and it seems like that’s going to be the best option.”

“I don’t want to cause you any trouble,” Orion replies, hedging.

 

“If it was going to be trouble, I wouldn’t be offering,” is Troy’s firm response.

“And besides, we’re a team,” Emma adds. “Whenever one of us is in trouble, the others are there to help. That’s what being a Ranger is all about.”

Gia nods her agreement. “I’m sure you’d do the same for any of us.”

It’s the realization that she’s right that finally gets Orion to agree.

He goes home with Troy, having collected his few belongings in a duffel bag, the strap slung over his shoulder. They walk together down the streets of a residential part of town Orion hasn’t seen before, since the Armada usually focuses its attacks on more populous areas. It’s a nice neighborhood. The streetlights kick on as the sun sets, and Orion watches the resulting shadows dance across the sidewalk.

“So...do your parents know? That you’re a Ranger, I mean.” The question is tentative; Troy has been quiet ever since they left Ernie’s, and Orion is reluctant to bother his new host and roommate. 

“I don’t live with my parents,” Troy replies, and the flicker of emotion that crosses his face when he says it makes Orion immediately wish he hadn’t asked. “The people I live with...it’s a long story, and I’ll explain everything once you’re settled in. But they’re good people, and...well, let’s just say they’re used to taking in strays.”

It takes Orion a minute to process the turn of phrase; much of the idiom of this Earth-native language is still unfamiliar to him. Once he gets it, though, he feels as though he understands Troy’s insistence on finding him a ‘real’ home a bit more clearly. 

Troy’s foster parents are as nice as he said they were, and Orion is relieved when they don’t ask him any questions that he wouldn’t know how to answer. He thanks them sincerely for letting him stay. They just smile, make sure that he has a decent dinner, and drag the roll-away bed from the attic into Troy’s bedroom. 

Despite everyone’s urgings to make himself at home, Orion still feels uncomfortably like an invader, like he doesn’t belong here. He slinks around Troy’s room like a trapped zoo animal being released into a new enclosure, taking in all the details and personal effects with curiosity. Troy keeps the room neat and orderly. His half-finished homework is lying on a desk in the corner, his bookbag propped up on the floor next to it. There are a few posters tacked to the walls - pictures of musical artists, mostly, even one or two that Orion has already gotten familiar with. And a handful of photographs. Most feature the other Rangers. The few that don’t, Orion doesn’t ask about, figuring that they’re part of the explanation Troy promised him before. 

He spends the night on the roll-away bed in Troy’s room.

It’s reasonably comfortable, though the openness of the room in comparison to his locker is disconcerting. And it feels strange sleeping with another person so close by. Troy is not a sound sleeper. He tosses and talks to himself, mumbling half-coherent snatches of the future that send a chill down Orion’s spine. And even when he’s silent, Orion can still hear him breathing.

He’s been alone for so long that the sound seems alien to him. Comforting, kind of, but alien regardless. 

He can’t remember the last time he’s listened to anyone’s breathing other than his own.

***

He spends the night in the Command Center.

Tensou has recommended that he stay for observation after his ordeal with Vrak. He doesn’t want to, and protests the decision, but the other Rangers badger him until he agrees to stay. It’s probably for the best. He’s weak and exhausted and freezing cold; shaken both physically and mentally by the experience. Vrak was able to siphon off a truly terrifying amount of his life energy, and Tensou tells him it will take some time for that reserve to replenish itself. What Robo Knight gave to replace what Vrak took from him was enough to keep him alive even when he should have drowned. But it isn’t his, and he can feel it. His skin crawls with the sensation of a power unlike his own, and his mind echoes with thoughts and memories that don’t belong to him.

Troy brings him a few things from home - Home? When did he start thinking of it that way? - and reassures him that he’s managed to excuse Orion’s disappearance to his foster parents. They’ve been worried about him, Troy adds. Orion isn’t sure how to feel about that. 

By the time Tensou finally shoos the Rangers out of the Command Center, the hour is late. Orion is already nodding off as the base falls into silence, and his awareness is patchy at best. Emma gently smooths his hair and whispers a good night. The computer consoles emit a constant, droning hum. Tensou triggers something to dim the lights, and the whir of his wheels on the stone floor echoes in the cavernous space.

His sleep is deep and the dreams he has are not his own. They belong to Robo Knight.

***

It’s not until long after the battle has ended that the realization hits him. After they’ve said their goodbyes to the Legendary Rangers. After they’ve chased each other from the battlefield back to town, laughing and carrying on like children in the afterglow of their victory. After they go out for a celebratory froyo, where Ernie is surprised but pleased to see his former employee, and where everyone is finally able to enjoy a dessert without being interrupted by monsters. It’s after all of that, when the sun is dipping low in the sky and his teammates are preparing to disband and go home that he realizes. 

His ship is gone, destroyed in the last attack on Mavro’s flagship. They’ve decimated the Armada so thoroughly that there is no replacement.

By returning, he helped save his friends. He helped save the Earth. He accomplished the destruction of the Armada, his goal of preventing what happened to his home from happening to anyone else’s. And all it cost him was his last chance to see Andresia again. 

He says nothing, but he doesn’t need to. The other Rangers sense the change in his mood and converge on him, asking what’s wrong. He tells them; there’s no point in hiding it. And they encourage him not to lose hope, but it doesn’t seem to help. Troy takes him home, so at least he has a familiar place to sleep, and that at least is some small comfort.

By morning, Noah has found a solution. 

Not all of the Legendary Rangers who helped them yesterday are from Earth, he explains. The Astro Rangers - the Red and Silver powers Troy and Orion had used to save themselves from the flagship’s explosion - are known to have a ship capable of traversing the distance to Andresia. Noah had Tensou contact them. They weren’t far from Earth yet, and they were willing to help. 

On the ship, Orion finds himself restless, pacing with the same strange mixture of excitement and sadness he felt when he left Earth the first time. He’s not piloting the ship this time, so he doesn’t have that to focus his mind on. He hasn’t had to say any goodbyes yet, though. This is a much larger ship than the Armada fighters, and his teammates have decided to come with him. To see him off. 

Andros pages him to the bridge when they reach orbit, and he all but races across the ship to get there. 

The ex-Red Ranger has a troubled expression on his face, and is reluctant to speak. Words come more easily to Zhane, Orion’s counterpart, so it falls to him to break the news.

“We’ve done a complete sensor scan of the surface, and...I’m sorry, Orion, but we didn’t detect any lifesigns. Anywhere.”

His breath catches and his thoughts go blank.

Moving on autopilot, he goes to the console to check the readings for himself. He hears himself say that he still wants to go to the surface, gives the coordinates for his home village. He feels somehow disconnected from himself, as though he’s watching from outside. Numbed. Andros and Zhane exchange concerned glances, but comply with his request for teleportation.

He materializes in the deserted center of town, and all sensation comes flooding back at once. Everything is exactly as he left it. It looks, feels, smells, exactly like the home he’s longed for ever since he left. But the silence is deafening. And the knowledge that it’s this silent _everywhere_ , that his hopes of coming back to find other survivors and rebuild had been in vain, that the Armada spared nothing and he is now the last of his kind, that knowledge is overpowering. 

He won, and he has still been left with nothing.

He falls, and he screams. 

It’s beyond his control now, rage and grief and fear and desperate loneliness pouring out of him in a torrent. All the things that he could never permit himself to feel before, because he needed to be strong to fight. All the things he never wanted the other Rangers to see. They see it regardless, whether Andros and Zhane sent them to join him or whether they just knew to come, the difference is immaterial. He’s not even aware of their presence through the worst of it, and by the time he’s calmed enough to notice, he doesn’t have it in him to feel embarrassed. 

They find him kneeling on the ground, hands fisted into the scorched dust of his world. 

He’s pulled to his feet, gently. Surrounded in a collective embrace, the small effort of his friends to shield and comfort him in the face of this. He tries to explain, but it comes out choked and disjointed, before trailing off entirely as he realizes he simply doesn’t have the words to contain his loss. 

It is Troy who speaks for all of them. 

“You have a home on Earth,” he says. “And you have a family in us. It’s no replacement, I know. There is no replacement. But you’ll never be alone.”

He starts crying again, for a different reason. The Rangers stay with him, supporting him, until he’s ready to move. 

He’s in less of a hurry this time, and he walks through the village once, reverently. Collects a few things to take with him, mementos to prove that his world and its people were once alive, before the Armada took that life from them. Emma asks if it’s okay to take photos, and he tells her that it is. He’s not sure if he could ever bring himself to look at them - someday, maybe - but at least they’ll exist. 

When they return to the ship, he’s led to one of the crew cabins, and he sleeps through the entirety of the flight back to Earth.

***

Waking up feels just the same as waking up on the first morning after the Armada attacked Andresia. It still hurts, but the pain has dulled some. He’s still grievously wounded, but the bleeding has slowed. As before, his priority is living. When his village was destroyed, it was food, shelter, the things he needed to survive, those things first, and then a means of fighting back. This time, it’s more about building a new life than it is about surviving. He asks Ernie for his job back, and is told that he is always welcome. He finds a place of his own to live; a little studio apartment, a bit scuffed around the edges but clean and safe. He knows there’s always a place for him at Troy’s, but he feels like he now needs something a bit more permanent than couches and lockers and fold-up cots. 

As he settles into the new bed, he mentally replays Troy’s words to him. Reminds himself that Troy is right - these people, these things he has, they’re no replacement for what he lost on Andresia. But they are something, and that something is well worth living for. 

He spends the night on Earth, and he is home.


End file.
